The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor

Eddie Jaku is born in 1920 in Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany. His birth name is Abraham Salomon Jakubowicz—“Adi for short.” Adi, he tells us, is pronounced “Eddie” in English, his adopted language, and he directly asks the reader (“my friend’) to call him by that name. He has one sibling, a sister named Henni, and his extended family of uncles and aunts is very large and “loving.” His family is Jewish, but their religion is much less important to them than their love for Germany. Eddie’s maternal grandfather and one of his uncles were among the many Jews who sacrificed their lives for Germany in WWI.

Eddie’s father is a Polish immigrant who settled in Germany in his youth and made a comfortable living as a skilled mechanic. He too served the German war effort in WWI, helping to make heavy munitions for the army. Leipzig, his adopted city—the ancestral home of his wife—is one of Europe’s great centers of art and culture, and the Jewish community has long been an integral part of its cultural and economic life. Growing up, Eddie believes that he lives in the “most enlightened, most cultured, most sophisticated” society in the world, though he will soon learn “how wrong” he is (9).